As early as 1909, African Americans were utilizing the new medium of cinema to catalogue the world around them, using the film camera as a device to capture their lives and their history. The daunting subject of race and ethnicity permeated life in America at the turn of the twentieth century and due to the effect of certain early films, specific television images, and an often-biased news media, it still plagues us today. As new technologies bring the power of the moving image to the masses, African Americans will shoot and edit on laptop computers and share their stories with a global audience via the World Wide Web. These independently produced visions will add to the diverse cache of African American images being displayed on an ever-expanding silver screen. This wide range of stories, topics, views, and genres will finally give the world a glimpse of African American life that has long been ignored and has yet to be seen. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1400 cross-referenced entries on actors, actresses, movies, producers, organizations, awards, and terminology, this book provides a better understanding of the role African Americans played in film history. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about African American cinema.

"The authors, S. Torriano Berry and Venise T. Berry, utilize their academic and professional knowledge of mass communications, writing and cinema to create an extensive, comprehensive tome. . . .[T]he depth and coverage of this work is impressive. . . .As someone who has studied African American history, I found this to be a unique, interesting and extensive work that can be useful to some special libraries and most large academic or public libraries. While this book would greatly benefit students in African American studies programs, it could also be a good resource for libraries that have demand for cultural and mass communication studies." - s